XBOX Could Step Away From Day & Date Releases For Game Pass As Studios Detest The Business Model

Earlier this spring, Asha Sharma as part of her testament to bringing XBOX to new glory announced to be reverting the XBOX Game Pass pricing. The decision also severed day & date releases for Call of Duty on the subscription. In a later update, it was revealed that the initial change from November cost the XBOX firm millions in losses as a result. 

The conversation about the business model has been in question for years. We saw this when it was reported the service was said to be cannibalizing game sales back in 2023. A new perspective on the matter was addressed earlier this month. It was revealed that Microsoft to fund its XBOX endeavors was even allocating earnings from Minecraft to fuel new ambitions for the platform.

According to a new development on XBOX Game Pass, Jason Schreier in the recent Triple Click podcast reveals that game studios are detesting the subscription internally and even speculates that the firm could do away altogether with its first-party date-and-date release pledge too. You can listen to the segment in the video below:

“I think they keep it going, but at some point they’re just going to remove day one sales cause that makes no sense anymore.” Schreier goes on to elaborate that the business model puts games in a position that also devalue the release when people skip purchasing in favor for the monthly fee.

“There are a lot of people out there in studio leadership within XBOX who absolutely detest Game Pass thinks- it has destroyed the value of their games, thinking it have taken away from the value of all games in general just as a service and just has contributed a lot- it’s been a detriment to the games industry in those people’s because of how it devalues games.”

But point being that like these XBOX studios are expected sell their games and not just be part of Game Pass. So that adds a whole new set of wonky math that I don’t think ever really made sense to the equation. Now we’re seeing this new XBOX that is putting aside all those games and it’s just going to focus on this bigger stuff. That’s not to they’re not going to do new things […] But they’re definitely making bigger projects. 

One major change that is already being seen affect XBOX is the recent internal studio reset. While Microsoft has promised to commit in releasing already-announced titles, there is another caveat. For teams like Undead Labs & Ninja Theory, projects in development from these teams are not obligated to ship its titles on the XBOX Game Pass. You can read the full report by heading here.

Are you interested to see if Microsoft does away with day one releases for its titles on Game Pass?